Panel Transitions in Fun Home

So... This might be a bit into the tall weeds here, but today in prep for teaching Fun Home, I did a panel transition analysis modeled after Scott McCloud.

In McCloud's Understanding Comics, he delineates the six different kinds of panel transitions. They are:

(1) Moment to Moment: almost no time passes, very little changes from image to the next, and your brain engages in almost zero closure, it has to do no work to make sense of the image.

(2) Action To Action: A little bit of time passes. McCloud illustrates this with a shot of someone about to swing a bat, and a shot of someone hitting the ball. Again, little closure is needed.

(3) Subject to Subject: Here, a little more time is passing and the "camera" moves. So in a dialogue two-shot for example, if in the first panel it's a picture of me saying "how are you" and in the next it's your reply, that's a subject to subject transition (because the panels tackle different subjects).

(4) Scene To Scene: This is when you jump enough in either time or space (or both) that we're in a new scene.

(5) Aspect to Aspect: In this case, time stops and look in on different aspects of a scene. One way to think about this is like how Joss Whedon shoots the Buffy episode "The Body." He slows down time routinely by cycling through different aspects of a room (Buffy lying in bed, the fan cycling etc.) 

(6) Non-Sequitur: Is what it sounds like and is very rarely used.

As you might be able to tell, as we go up in number, we go up in the amount of imaginative work your brain has to do. After McCloud establishes this, he proceeds to do breakdown charts of various artist's work and the way they use panel transitions.

It turns out that most Western Comics use (with slight variations) the panel transition strategies pioneered by Jack Kirby. They almost never use Aspect, Non-sequiter or Moment transitions, and their other panels are largely Action to Action, with some Subject To Subject and Scene To Scene thrown in. Kirby's work, for example, is 65% Action, 20% Subject and 15% Scene.  

These ratios change a bit with other artists, but not that much (Maus, for example, has more scene than subject). But still, Action Transitions Are King.

Not so with Fun Home.  Here's how Alison Bechdel's panel transitions break out. The red columns are Action to Action, the Green are Subject to Subject, the Purple are Scene To Scene. Dark Blue is Moment to Moment and Light Blue is Aspect to Aspect. Obviously, there are some panel transitions that you have to just make an executive decision on, so some of this is rough, but anyway...  Check it out:

Graphing

This is a dramatically different breakdown than a normal comic book. Also, the number and percentage of action transitions shoots waaaaay up in the end.  Hopefully I'll have more to say about why this is and what the panel transition strategy has to do with both the form and content of the piece. But for now, I just thought I'd share it with you folks and see what you all think. 

Comments

[James]

Oddly enough, I just finished reading Fun Home. I think because the story's laid out as a scattershot memoir (it's not chronological; but bounces from one topic of her childhood to the next), I didn't notice how non-traditional the panel transitions were (the chapter describing their time working in the funeral home has almost no action to action or moment to moment transitioning).

[Alison Bechdel]

Wow, James!
Thanks for spending all that time analyzing my transitions. Your graph is fascinating. I would have guessed that there was a majority of scene-to-scene, and a minority of moment-to-moment, but the degrees are suprising!

I'm glad you didn't find any non sequiturs!

[NLC]

[koff][koff] Non-SequitUr [koff][koff]

[Andrew B]

I hope this is helpful...

Your description of the bar graph does not correspond to the graph as it appears on my screen (Macbook, OSX 10.6, Safari 5). To me the columns appear to be red or orange (M2M), green (A2A), blue (sub2sub), yellow (s2s), lavender or purple (asp2asp). The labels are correct, right?

I have only read McCloud once and I don't remember it well. You will explain to your students what "closure" means in this context, won't you? Because without it one can't really follow your characterization of the different transitions. Also, in your explanation of scene to scene, you use the word "scene". Obviously scene to scene means you're moving between scenes. The question is what counts as a distinct scene. For that matter, what constitutes different subjects?

I do hope this is helpful. Probably my problems in understanding the definitions are due to the fact that I don't remember McCloud well at all. Anyhow, you are learning what Alison's hard core fans are like. I hope you're appropriately sympathetic!

[Swistle]

This is such a neat project. I wonder if this is in part why, even though I don't think of myself as a fan of comics per se, I love Alison Bechdel's work?

[isaac]

Andrew,

Of course that's helpful, and I appreciate the spirit in which you're offering the critiques. First off, that's really, really weird that the colors are different on your chart. Second, since my class is mostly of people who are new to comics, I'll be defining my terms much more thoroughly than I do on the blog.

The response from Alison (and her fans!) has also definitely lit a fire under me to write my follow up post where I try to talk about why Scene-to-Scene transitions are so dominant and what it has to do with the content of the piece.

[NLC]

[koff] Check the paragraph beginning "It turns out..." [koff]

[decorative storage boxes]

Looks like a cool project... what about the price?